The latest Penguin update from Google on May 22, 2013, saw a remarkable difference in the rankings of websites, on top search engines. And, it has once again raised questions over the role of search engine optimisation (SEO), as part of web development.
Search engine optimisation is often considered the act of making small, but significant modifications to specific parts of a website. These changes can vary from keyword rich, high quality content to genuine link building, to enhance the credibility of a website.
No matter what the alteration is one thing remains certain hiring a specialised search engine optimisation company like Total Web Design is important.
Our web developers focus on the following key areas when making a website search engine-friendly:
Professional service providers such as those at Total Web Design, are well-versed in the prevailing market trends and have a proven track record of successful project completion. They offer commendable results by utilising world class tools and services.
So connect with Total Web Design. We are a dependable web design company, and we offer authentic and exceptional SEO services and much more.
If you are responsible for the material written on your website or blog, don’t overlook the power of using basic rules for creating SEO content.
In the past few years, there has been an entire industry spawned around search engine optimisation, or SEO. Goolge’s last round of algorithm and indexing updates left SEO experts scratching their heads wondering what happened to the basic strategies. The fact remains that in order for there to be some kind of reasonable index of websites, the indexing programs must follow some system.
As far as Total Web Design is concerned, the status quo for onpage optimization including meta tags for title and description is still valid. Each page requires a focus keyword phrase otherwise which makes sense for creating SEO content written in a meaningful manner.
SEO Content writing is a critical component of your online advertising and is this is especially true for merchants wanting to use pay per click advertising to build up leads or sales. Pay per click is closely tied to keywords used on the sales page including the onpage SEO content ingredients. Below is a brief introduction to these components found in the HTML of each web page – or at least they should be found there!
Meta Data: The Meta data appears in the Head section of your page HTML. This is the top portion of the page found before the Body tag. This information is not visible to visitors unless they look at the source of your page. However, it is important to search engine robots (programs).
Title Tag: This is what you see as the web page title on Google search results. It is limited to 59 characters including spaces. Include your page keyword at the beginning and any secondary keywords after that.
Description Tag: This is what you see beneath the title on your Google listing. Include your main keyword early, and describe the meaning of your web page. Use no more than 160 characters, including spaces.
Keyword Tag: This is your list of keywords relevant to the page. While you can list a number of keyword phrases, plan on limiting it to 5 as you want to also include the keywords in the SEO content. If you provide too many, your readers may find the page difficult to read and comprehend.
If you would rather have someone take this chore off your hands we offer SEO content writing at very affordable rates. Contact us on 0433 399 294 to get started.
Competition is fierce online, and the top places on the search result pages are the most hunted for; therefore, any website owner who wants to capture traffic from the Web needs to use a whole strategy to attract the best visitors and the highest traffic. The working principle for the blog optimization for search engines is the keyword.
When you start the race for SEO (search engine optimization), you already have an advantage: blogs are usually the ones to capture traffic more than static sites due to their highly informational content. By keywords we mean those phrases that a user types in the search box of an engine.
Blogs mainly rely on articles that are regularly updated and re-freshened, so that they have something new to offer all the time. New content with new keywords and informational articles captures new traffic.
Preparing for a Blog
Before you write the blog content, your SEO analyst will make a list with keywords related to your domain and which are most likely to be typed in the search box by Internet users. A brain-storming session is ideal to find the best structures you need to include in the pages and articles. There isn’t a single recipe to capture traffic and requires tweaking the recipe over and over.
Keep in mind that there are some rules you may have to follow here as well. For instance, choosing some very general keywords is not the best way to promote a business via a blog given the fact that though you may receive a high traffic, the profit could remain modest. Too broad terms attract all sorts of users, even those that are not interested in purchasing something. SEO experts use all sorts of parameters to check the profitability of a blog, and one of them deals with the number of relevant visitors a web page attracts.
The status of pages and keyword searches may change from one day to the other, given the intense competition that characterizes the Internet in general. Also, search engine companies change around their programs in an attempt to deliver better results to people searching for information. Consequently, the more frequently you update your web blog with new content, the better chances you have of benefiting from changes in search algorithms.
Marketing online isn’t akin to hitting an “easy button
Posted by admin in Latest Article, SEO on June 11th, 2012
Since search is very dependent on keywords, incoming links, and site structure 90% of the analysis and work you search engine optimisation consultant performs is around those areas.
Your search engine optimisation consultant reviews the basic structure of your website. What pictures, banners, words and videos appear on your web pages is very important, but there are often technical problems with a website preventing it from achieving high search results. Broken links, insufficient internal and external links, poorly designed page hierarchy and navigation can prevent search engines from accessing all your pages. Worse, it can prevent people from connecting to your pages and offerings.
Your search engine optimisation Australia team works to correct these deficiencies. Our goal is to produce a website design that provides targeted results so that people find your website because it ranks at the top of search engine results. Search engine optimisation is designed to improve search engine rankings.
We became one of the leading SEO companies in Australia because we are results driven. These days, it doesn’t make sense to ignore the power of using the web to get more customers. Your competition is not getting any easier. As your search engine optimisation specialists, we efficiently create a website design that uses best web design practices coupled with SEO and content strategies.
Your search engine optimisation consultant will ask questions to understand your unique selling proposition. We ask questions to understand what makes your company different from your competition. Your search engine optimisation Australia team works to ensure that the content is optimized for your brand and for what makes your company stand out in its industry. Then our copywriters meld relevant keywords into compelling content designed to attract buyers into your sales funnel.
Using search engine optimisation for new keywords means that you attract people searching for those new keywords. Our search engine optimisation strategy takes these new keywords and crafts them into engaging, relevant material. It all adds up to more highly ranked pages that bring in more traffic and ultimately more customers to your business.
Google doesn’t mind sharing how changes to their algorithm impact search engine behaviour. Really, they do have their best interests in mind: they want to be the premiere Internet search engine that everyone loves to use—and other search engines chase. In order to do that a Google Fellow recently spoke about the latest algorithm update titled ‘Google Caffeine’ and how it impacts the lives of web designers, web copywriters and ultimately businesses who use their websites to grow their business.
So what is an Algorithm?
The code and methods that give life to a search engine are referred to as an algorithm. Asearch enginealgorithm is like a big mathematical secret that only search engine brain surgeons and programmers can possibly understand. That’s fine because the huge majority of us only care about the information the search engines bring back to us when we search for stuff. An algorithm ‘update’, like Google Caffiene, is a tweak to that secret recipe intended to improve the quality of results returned to us when we do a search.
What Does Google Caffeine Do?
Sometimes when you perform a search for something on the Web it may be for information that has been in the public domain for a long time. An example might be a search for ‘what is the state flower of New South Wales’? This is a piece of information that has been on the Web for several years. It rarely is updated. So if you search for that information today, tomorrow and next week you’ll find that the results are the same. A new page may pop up on the search engine results page occasionally over several months, but certainly not on a daily basis.
On the other hand, there are events that get a lot of searches because they are hot items of the day or hour. An example might be searching for the latest results for your favourite tennis championplaying at the Australian Open. Prior to the Google Caffeine algorithm update the results you saw for this type of search wouldn’t necessarily present the most current updates on the Web.
Google Caffeine changes that now. To show you what I mean, I did a test. Being a bit of a horse racing fan I was following the news on the Breeder’s Cup championship held today in the United States.
I searched Google for the phrase ‘breeders cup’ and was presented these results:
Notice how Google returned the most recent results to me. A post from 9 minutes ago announced that Drosselmeyer (a bit of a longshot) won the Breeder’s Cup. There are a couple of other results that follow this that occurred within the same timeframe, a video and article about upsets. The 4th listing is the Breeder’s Cup website. Not unusual since it would be the authority site for the Breeder’s Cup. What is impressive is that it was knocked out of first position by the more current Drosselmeyer news clip.
How to take advantage of the Google Caffeine change?
Google search engines spiders love fresh content. Keep your website content fresh by leveraging topical news within your posts. Use Google alerts to keep on top of news that is important to you or your industry. Chances are a static website will lose ranking and traffic unless you leverage fresh posts, articles and news to keep those spiders fat and happy.
Your Next Step…
You get it, but don’t have the time to do regular content management. Ask about how we can keep your website on top of search engine results with our SEO copywriting services.
Currently, there is a lot going on regarding Google and the way they index pages. Since there are a lot of changes going on, it is a good idea to review the Google SEO discussions to keep up on changes. By learning more about it and how you can use it, you can have confidence in planning out your website SEO strategies. That way you won’t see huge shifts in ranking when Google changes their algorithms. It is important to learn SEO and how it relates to search engines now. By the way, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This term means that all web pages have been designed and optimized so Google can index the pages faster and put the pages of the website further to the top of search results; based on certain keywords that appear on each page of the website.
SEO and Google Search Query
To better understand SEO, you need to learn how Google Search Query works. Since Google is the leader in search traffic, we’ll start here with a discussion on SEO. The first step in the process begins when someone types in a word or phrase in the search field in Google. The web server sends the query to the index servers. The content that is contained on the index servers is similar to a book index. Google parses through the index and lists website that rank highly for that keyword phrase.
Next, the query travels to the doc servers. This is when the actual web pages or documents are retrieved. Then the server creates snippets so as to provide a description for the results of the search. Once this step has been completed, the results that were retrieved are sent to your computer and displayed on your screen. All of this is done in a fraction of a second.
How to Use SEO
Now you understand SEO and how it relates to search engines. So how can you use SEO to get your page ranked to the top of search results? One tip to get you pages indexed faster is provide search engines with a sitemap. By providing them a sitemap, you are giving them a way to index your site faster as they will have a page with a bunch of links on it. Another SEO tip is to place your keyword or keyword phrase in the page title, and Meta tags. After this, make sure you have quality inbound links with anchor text using that same keyword for your web page.
Search Engine Optimization, sometime referred to as Search Engine Marketing, can seem overwhelming at first. There are new acronyms and terms to learn. You may be expert at your business or profession, but as an uninitiated player on the sidelines, it sounds like a lot of “computer voodoo.” However, once you understand the basic premise behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you catch on quickly to know what it’s all about.
The search engines, like Google, build an index of web pages for terms they believe are relevant to the content found on the page. When you perform a search using Google, you really are searching and index of all the web pages on the Internet. They do this because the better their results returned to the searcher, the more likely that person continues to use that search engine. Of course, there are other motivations like the paid advertisements that are found on a search results page. But that’s a topic for another day.
Each search engine results page (or SERP) includes about ten organic listings (i.e. those you don’t have to pay for) your goal is to have your page indexed on Page One for a set of terms you believe relevant to your content and business.
To do this, you simply give the search engines what they want.
So, what do search engines want?
Search engines want a number of things but here are some of the basic ingredients that are common to Google, Yahoo and Bing:
1. Quality web design and informative content.
The better your content is, the more likely the search engines are to help you promote your content through better search engine placement.
But how do the search engines determine the quality of your content? Since they do this through an automated process, they had to come up with metrics that allow programs to award points to each web page on your website. Some of these points are related to what is found in the HTML of your web pages. Other points are awarded for how long people linger on your website and if they visit other pages. The longer a visit lasts then the greater the likelihood that they find the content on your pages helpful.
In other words, they found what they searched for using the search engine tool. The visitor had a positive experience and your website is awarded more points than another where people only visit a single page or stay just a few seconds.
2. Ability to easily evaluate what the main keyword phrases are to place in the index for your web pages.
Similar to the index at the end of a book, you expect the search index to present results for you to review that actually are relevant to your query. As your pages will be found when someone conducts a Web search, the search engines need to index your pages for terms (called keyword phrases) that are most relevant to your on-page content.
You can help them by ensuring that each page of your site is optimized around keyword phrases. How many keywords you should optimize for is really not known, in fact, there may not be a set number of phrases. The key is to ensure that each keyword phrase is relevant to each other.
For example, a website about arthritis in dog shouldn’t have pages and keywords devoted to how to raise your puppy. Instead, chose keyword phrases like arthritis in dogs, natural treatments for arthritis in dogs, and so on.
After choosing which keyword phrases to target, make sure to add them to your “meta page title” and “meta page description” at minimum. These are HTML components of your web page.
Also, it’s important that these keyword phrases appear somewhere on your actual page… the content that can be read by your human visitors. This helps the search engines to index your pages more easily and you will be rewarded for your work.
3. Getting as many links as possible for each page of your site.
In Internet terms, each link pointing to your site is seen as a “vote” that your page is relevant to the piece of text that is linked.
So, if you want a particular page of your site found for the keyword phrase, best Sydney plumber, you’d be wise to get as many websites as possible to link to your page using this phrase in their “anchor text.”
Anchor text is merely the words that create the clickable link. If the phrase, “best Sydney plumber,” is linked to your web page, you just earned a “vote” for that page.
The more links you can get with that term, the more likely your page will be to rank well for it.
There are numerous methods to improve the SEO of your website. The principles discussed above create the foundation for each page of your website. If your pages contain great content and the website is sound, pages are optimized for a relevant keyword phrases and are linked to from other websites, you’re on your way to improved search engine placement.
One of the first things we do when we bring on a new client is to analyze what their competition is doing as far as search engine optimization, or SEO. Competitor analysis is a huge part of SEO. If you want to be the number one listing for a keyword phrase, you have to be able to bump the current listing off that ranking.
We research the resulting web pages that show up in search results for keyword phrases that are relevant for the client’s niche. If our client owns a bar in Sydney, then we’ll go to Google and type in Sydney bar to see who pops-up on the organic listings. The organic listings are those down the middle of the page, not on the right side or very top of the results page. Then we’ll note some important facts about the top 5 listings. Here are things that are worth noting:
Domain Name
Is the page listed the top-level domain name or is it an inner page. If you look at the term Sydney bar and you find that the first listing is for www.sydneycafes.com.au/bars.html, then you know that one of this website’s internal pages is ranking as # 1. If the page listed is the very top level domain, i.e., www.sydneycafes.com.au, then the top level of the domain is ranking for #1.
It’s important to know that for a few reasons. It’s quicker to basically jump other listings and get page one results if you can grab the keyword specific domain. So if you’re looking for ranking on Sydney bar and if SydneyBar.com or .org or .net is available, you may get to the top of the search results simply by buying that domain and putting up well crafted web pages optimized for the search engines. This gives you a very strong likelihood of ranking for that term very quickly.
This is often one of the hardest things for a business owner to accept. They’d much rather have the domain named for the bar. Of course, that is often the path we have to accept. We won’t argue with a strong brand name. If they already own RockpoolBar.com with strong brand recognition, then we’ll just improve on the current website while maintaining the domain name. [However, we might must go ahead and purchase Sydneybar dot com if it is available. That is premium Web real estate.]
Domain Age
More mature websites are harder to compete with than websites that are new or under a year old. The concept here is that an established website is one that is more likely to be around in the future. If you are buying a domain, you may want to pay extra for an aged domain. The price can go up astronomically with age, so do some serious thought as to the value of that domain to your brand image or web strategies. New domains can still compete for top ranking when the website design is sound and content writer uses smart SEO strategies. If you are registering a new domain, consider spending the extra $10 to register it for 2 years instead of for one.
Google Page Rank
One other thing to take note of when you’re doing competitor analysis is the Google Page Rank. Page Rank is a calculation, based on incoming links, of Google’s estimation of the importance of a page. It is expressed on a scale of 0-10 in the toolbar, with ten being more important.
On Page SEO
Take a look at your competitor’s on page SEO. On page SEO includes things like meta tags, url relationship to keywords, header tags (H1, H2, H3…) and the keyword density. Take note of their weaknesses and make them your strengths.
Evaluate In-bound Links
You can use the Yahoo Site Explorer to see what links are pointing to the competitor’s high ranking page. Avoid attracting links from unrelated websites, or worse, links from adult-type websites (unless, you have an adult-type website.)
The best way to get quality in-bound links is not to pay for links. The best way is to create unique, compelling content that attracts links. This is a win/win because not only will great content attract links pointing to your website, but also visitors.
You can offer articles to website owners. Contact the owner and ask if they would be open to posting a unique article that includes a link back to your top-level domain or internal page. Usually, a website owner is open to posting quality, unique material. All you need to do is make it available to them.
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