SEO Services

SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of maximising your position or rank on the organic or natural search engine listings. There are over 200 individual factors that effect your position on Google, the most popular search engine and SEO is about understanding those factors and ensuring your site works to meet those factors.

Many believe that SEO is complex but it shouldn't be. I always explain that Google is like a librarian albeit a very pragmatic one. If you ask the librarian for a book on the life of the Kangaroo for example,they will easily know how to find one. How?

Well, when a book first arrives at the library, the librarian will look at the title of the book, the chapters and the content and then decide where to put the book on the shelves. If it's a relatively good book, a new book or published by a particularly authoritative author on the subject it will be given a more prominent position. So, when you ask for a book on the life of the Kangaroos, the librarian sends you to the right section and you attempt to match your search.

Google works in exactly the same way. When you ask Google for content on the life of the Kangaroo, Google looks at its database and tries to match up a site for you by looking at the title of the site, the chapters, headings, content and publisher. If these elements match, Google serves you the site in its listings. So you now see what SEO is all about; its about matching up your site title, headings and content and telling Google honestly and clearly what your site is all about.

...to understand how SEO works in its Google Webmaster site at bit.ly/1ab7kt. Many SEO agencies like you to believe that SEO is a 'dark art' and that all they know is highly secret and technical. It isn't and SEO is something we can all do.

So, SEO falls into three distinct areas; research, on-page factors, and off-page factors. On-page elements are those factors you control within the code and content of your own site. Off-page factors include for example inbound links to your site, creating content for BLOGS, news sites, online PR and social media

The first step in SEO must be to evaluate your current position and where your potential traffic will come from; if you can't monitor it, you can't manage it. What are people actually searching for? Is Google even aware of your site? How many pages does it see? What does it see? Remember, Google is a piece of software so it sees your site very differently to a human visitor and this is what it uses to rank you site for those searches your potential customers are making.

The very first element in evaluating our site is to investigate what terms or key phrases your potential customers are actually entering into Google to find your products and services. Don't guess as these key phrases will probably be very different to the key phrases you would use. Google has a great tool for finding this information at bit.ly/8r2NJ. This shows you how many searches there were for each key phrase, how much competition there is for that key phrase and even other similar, related key phrases you may not have though about. Once you understand what your potential audience is looking for, SEO is then all about matching your site and it's content to those key phrases.

Next you need to look at how Google views your site. There is a simple way to achieve this. Simply enter 'site:www.yourdomain.com' into Google and you see a list of the pages Google knows about. If there are pages in your site that don't appear here, there may be a problem or a barrier to Google on your site.

Clicking on 'Cached' then reveals further information such as the date that Google visited your page. If Google hasn't visited this page for more than a month, your page may have fallen out of favour, usually as the content hasn't changed. If this is your homepage, you have a major problem.

Further clicking on 'Text-only version' then shows you what Google actually sees. This may be very different to what you expect, but be aware, this is what you are being judged on by Google. If the page is blank or shows little content, you have a problem.


Manage
Once you are aware of the current state of your site, you are in a position to start making improvements.

The first element to consider is that Google looks at the technical framework for your site. You really need the help of your technical people however; you need to know the right questions to ask them. This is where your research comes in. Is my site written in XHTML? Is my layout table based or CSS based? What have you put in our META description tag? What are you using for our TITLE tags and H1 tags. These won't mean much to most but they should certainly mean a lot to your Web developer. Google looks for clear, current, compliant ...code and this does influence your ranking.

Some of the problems you may identify from your evaluation above need a technical fix however, if there was one on-site exercise you could undertake to make an immediate difference it would be to update your content on a regular basis. Nothing pleases Google more than to see regular additions to the content of your site.

If you want Google to treat your site as authoritative and relevant; ranking your pages over others, you need to create fresh, relevant content, relating to the key phrases you identified above on a regular basis. Maintaining your own Website needn't be expensive either, there are plenty of options for a content management system or CMS starting from as little as $20/month.

So, in summary, know your online market place, get your site in great shape technically, and keep the content up to date. Simple!

When you consider off-page SEO, it's often exclusively about link building. However, this is missing so much of what off-page SEO is all about. Link building should be a natural process, not a forced one and quality is so much more important than quantity. Google looks at inbound links, that is links to your site as a sign of recommendation; a vote. However, Google also looks at the value of that vote. How? Google ranks each site and gives it a score out of ten, called PageRank™ and the best way to see this is to install the Google Toolbar at bit.ly/3jdg9o. This gives you an awful lot of information for SEO work and is well worth using.

So, you need to build good inbound links and the best way to do this is manually, don't use 'link farming' services. Contact the owner of the Web site you.

...want to link with. Try trade associations, authoritative sites and sites with a PageRank™ of 4+. These are authoritative, trusted and established in Google's view.

Also, remember all that great content on your site? Get it out there on forums, social media sites and news/bookmarking sites like Digg (digg.com). Try to look for FAQs and answer users questions with good, relevant information. Don't just sell though, be more subtle and you'll be far more welcome. The value of the links back to your site from these actions will be immense but it's not just the link, real people follow these links to your site and that's what you want, real people.


Recent Developments
So, what's new in SEO? The main shift in search recently is the concept of real-time search; search based on what is being said right now, predominantly on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Using a service such as Twitter Search at search.twitter.com shows you what is being talked about right now. Twitter shows a list of the most popular key phrases that are being talked about right now and this is a great way to find out what is happening often before news breaks on TV. The recent death of Michael Jackson appeared on Twitter before any of the TV news channels picked up the story.

How can you use this? Well if you know what people are talking about, make sure you update your site with related content. Listen with Twitter, don't just speak on Twitter. Become an authority on all that is new and talk about it first.