Web or Dead SEO Blog

Wordpress or Blogger - Which one is best for search engine optimisation

2008-02-22T12:31:00.005Z

Hi Mike, im considering setting up a free blog. Can you tell me if its better to use a Blogger blog or a Wordpress blog, from an search engine optimisation point of view.

Regards
Steve.

Hi Steve, thanks for your question.

I myself use Blogger and Wordpress. There is an seo plugin available for Wordpress blogs that automatically optimizes your titles for search engines. Generates META tags automatically, and avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs, which Google can penalize sites for.

It is also fully editable, and compatable with many other plugins like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others. So from the point of view of setting up your blog to be search engine friendly, then Wordpress is best, as Blogger does not have a similar plugin, yet.

You can download the plugin here http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/all-in-one-seo-pack.zip

Blogger does not have the flexibility that Wordpress has, but I think Blogger is easier to use for beginners.

I seem to get better search results with Blogger blogs. That may have something to do with the fact that Google runs Blogger, or it may just be coincidence.

Content has a lot to do with search engine results, so at the end of the day that is what counts ultimately, whether you have a Blogger blog or a Wordpress blog.

I hope this answers your question Steve, please let me know if you need more help.

To get your seo question answered, and posted on this blog, please email us at webordead@yahoo.com

SEO Advisory Service - Advice For Forum Owners.

2008-02-10T12:22:00.002Z

As I said in my previous post, we would be starting a free SEO advisory service. Well here is the first question from Scott Nicol.

Hi, I am a student and website owner. I own The Seven Forums.com which is now running on fully paid for servers since around August last year and IPB, which put me back £75 about 1 month ago.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to really get the site to take off. Do you think you could help me out, and give some suggestions? The site is based around the upcoming Windows release Windows Seven, which has been rumoured to be coming out the 2nd half of 2009.

Thanks,
Scott Nicol

Hi Scott, thanks for your email.

Forum's are very hard to get off the ground.

You need to create interaction with your users. Posting on other related forum's and having your site in your signature is one way to attract people to your forum.

You can also employ paid posters to make your forum look busy which may encourage people to join in. They dont cost much and are always good to kick start a new forum.

You also need to work on SEO by generating back links from related sites to get your forum listed high in Google. This can bring a lot of traffic if done well. If you dont have the time to do your own SEO, you could outsource the work to an SEO Services company.

You can also promote your forum in Google or Yahoo groups.

Forum's are all about community, likeminded people discussing things that they all have a common interest in. You need to find those people and give them a reason to come to your forum.

Its not easy, but if you do manage to build a successful forum it can be worth a lot of money, and give you a lot of satisfaction.

I hope that this information has been of some help to you.

Best of luck with it.

Regards
Mike.

Apologies, but we have been so busy.

2008-01-11T11:14:00.000Z

I am so ashamed that we have not updated our blog since August. We have been really busy with our own projects, and projects for our clients that we have just not had the time.

Everyone that reads this blog please accept my appologies, we will try and stop by once in a while to give you something to read.

Just to update everyone, we have just started a free SEO advisory service. The idea behind it is for people to email in their SEO related questions, and we will publish the question and our advice on the blog. Time permitting.

So if you would like to be the first one, then drop us an email at webordead@yahoo.com with you SEO question or problem and we will advise you on the best way to proceed, and publish the info on here on the blog, for the benefit of all our readers. That is if we have any left. :)

Thanks again to everyone that stops by, and happy new year.

Google To Scrap PageRank?

2007-08-05T20:00:00.000Z

You heard it here first. Google are going to get rid of page rank, or are they?

Page rank is a constant problem for the Google algorithm. Having to decide the importance of a site, by the importance of the sites that link to it.

Are these links genuine? or have they been purchased? or are they 3 way links? Are sites buying links for pagerank, or for traffic, who can tell? Google certainly cant.

High page rank sites usually get high traffic, so how do you decide who is buying for pr, and who is buying for traffic. Who does Google penalize, and who does Google ignore.

Google attempted to combat pr manipulation by introducing the rel="nofollow" attribute in 2005, but this hasn't stopped the problem.

The only answer to this problem as far as I can see is to scrap the page rank altogether. Or at least make it a secret. Without the ability to check a sites page rank, webmasters and site owners will not be able to try to influence the Google algorithm, by getting links from high page rank sites, and attempting to manipulate the Google search results in their favour.

If webmasters and site owners were prevented from knowing the importance of a site in Googles eyes, then the Google search results would be less prone to manipulation, and would result in a more accurate set of search results.

Take the headache out of SEO

2007-07-26T15:46:00.002Z

SEO, link building, website optimisation, article submission, directory submission, blog posting, the list goes on.

How many times have you sat at your PC and thought "OK I'm going to do some SEO for my site"6 hours later, you are still sitting there, your head hurts, your stomach is empty, and you have done nothing.

Search Engine Optimisation is a frustrating time consuming job. You can spend weeks working on SEO for your site, and your rankings are still no where near where you want them to be.

The most frustrating thing about SEO is you cannot really see the results of your efforts. It may take several weeks, or even months, before you see any change in your search engine rankings. So how do you know that what you are doing today, is going to benefit your site 3 months down the line? Well unless you are an SEO expert you don't.

So what is the answer? Well the answer is to outsource your SEO work to someone that specializes in SEO. Would you consider rebuilding the engine on your car? No, you would probably employ a car mechanic to do it for you. So do the same with your SEO.

How do you know which SEO companies are good at SEO, and which are just good at talking? Testimonials are one way. Don't just read the testimonials on their site, as most, if not all of them, are made up. Ask for telephone numbers of their clients and speak to them directly. Or ask them to show you results that they have achieved for their clients. If they will not give you this information just move on to someone who will.

A good SEO company will tell you exactly what they are going to do for you. They will try to explain SEO in a format that you will understand, not try to baffle you with tech speak.

Take SEO Unique for example, they are an SEO company based in London. They believe that the key to their success is customer service. They give their customers free SEO resources to help them understand what SEO is all about. They are also in the process of setting up a free SEO questions and answers section on their site.

Look for SEO companies like SEO Unique. Companies that are not afraid to explain SEO in lay mans terms. If you have a better understanding of what is involved, then you are in a better position to decide what you need. It is then down to the SEO company that you choose, to deliver the results that you are after.

Choosing an SEO company is very a difficult job, there is no doubt about that, but if you take a few of these pointers on board, then you should be better equipped to negotiate the minefield that is SEO.

Submit Your Site To Web Directories For Traffic And SEO

2007-07-18T18:43:00.000Z

Some people love them, some people hate them, but, submitting your site to web directories can bring your site traffic, and help your sites SEO.

Submitting your site to directories is a time consuming job. There are thousands of directories where you can submit your site, and it would take forever to submit to them all.
Therefore you should only choose established directories, with good page rank and good traffic. Established high page rank directories, are well respected by Google, so getting your site listed there will get your site more Google respect, and higher listings within Google search results.

When submitting, pick the most appropriate category for your site. Google loves relevant links, so this is important. Use a good comprehensive keyword rich description for your site. This will help search engines determine the relevancy of your listing. If you write a good description, you will also have a better chance of getting your site approved, in the case of free directory submissions.

Paid directory submissions are also very good for SEO. Google gives more weight to paid directory submissions, as they are less likely to contain the spam that some of the free directories tend to get. A paid listing on a good directory such as Dirsensei Web directory is worth 20 or 30 free listings in my opinion.

The primary purpose of Dirsensei is to list the best quality family friendly websites available, and their directory is made available to users of all ages. Though they are a premium paid directory, they also welcome non commercial sites and list them accordingly. They prefer to list informative sites, and they are all nicely categorized. They also have a latest links page where you can view the latest sites that have been added to the directory.

If you have the funds available, then paid directories are the way to go, to benefit your SEO and generate the most traffic for your site. Lots of free directories get very little traffic, and have little or no page rank. When you compare those to Dirsensei with a page rank 5, and around 3000 visitors per day, you can see the benefits of a paid directory listing.

There is also the time factor to consider when submitting to directories, you may have to submit to 30 free directories, in order to get the same benefit to your site, that one paid listing may bring.

So whether you decide to go for paid, or free directory submissions, always be sure to spend time on your title and your description, to ensure the most successful outcome of your submission, for traffic and for SEO.

Google Bowling

2007-07-05T11:42:00.000Z

I have recently been reading quite a few articles regarding Google bowling.

Now for those of you that do not know what Google blowing is, let me explain.

Its basically a process by where you try to get a competitors site dropped from Google, by getting hundreds or thousands of spammy links pointing to the site.

The idea is to make Google think that the site owners are trying to spam their site to the top of the search engines.

Now I have heard of companies that are apparently specialists in this field, charging a fortune to carry out this type of reverse SEO, to get sites dropped from Google. But I personally believe Google bowling is a myth.

Google does drop sites in and out of its index from time to time, but I don't think that you can affect a sites ranking by getting links to it from spammy sites.

This is the way I see it. A site owner has no control over who links to their site. If you get natural links from spammy sites how can you be penalized for it? If your site links to spammy sites, you can get penalized for that, as you do have control over who your site links to.

Google likes links from quality authority sites related to your sites content. Getting links from these sites will see your site listed higher in Google, getting links from spammy sites will not in my opinion get your site dropped, it will just not get your site listed any higher. Google will basically ignore the non relevant spammy links.

So if anyone approaches you and tells you they can get your competitors site dropped from Google by using this so called Google Bowling technique, then take it with a pinch of salt. Apart from the fact that it is highly unethical, its also highly unsuccessful in my opinion.

The do's and dont's of SEO

2007-06-03T08:58:00.000Z

First the dont's

Don't use frames on your website.
Don't use homepage or index for the title tag of your website.
Don't overuse your keywords in your meta tags.
Don't overuse your keywords on your page.
Don't hide text in your page.
Don't pay someone to submit your site to search engines.
Don't buy links from high page rank sites.
Don't participate in reciprocal link exchanges.
Don't try to do your own SEO if you do not have a clue what you are doing.
Don't link to spammy sites or unrelated sites.
Don't call your links page LINKS, call it Resources.
Don't overuse Google ads.
Don't use someone elses content.
Don't create pages with little or no content on.
Don't fill your site with links to affiliate programs you participate in.

Now the do's

Do use CSS to build your site.
Do use meta tags.
Do use H1 and H2 tags for on page SEO.
Do have a good descriptive title to all of your pages.
Do link all of your pages back to your homepage.
Do have a site map.
Do try to get fresh original content for your site.
Do update your site regularly.
Do have a blog about your site.
Do submit your sites to relevant directories.
Do write articles and submit them to article directories.
Do write press releases and submit them to press release sites.
Do submit your site to social bookmarking sites.
Do try to get quality back links from relevant sites.
Do use anchor text in your backlinks.
Do name your images on your site.
Do check your site for broken links.
Do link to quality sites.

If anyone would like to add to this list of do's and dont's please send them on email. Or post as comments.

If this list has has helped you in some way, please bookmark it at your favourite social bookmarking sites, to help others. You can easily do this by clicking the relevant button at the bottom of this post. Thank you, and good luck with your SEO efforts.

Building Link Popularity To Increase Search Engine Rankings

2007-05-25T20:34:00.000Z

Good search engine rankings are what every site owner strives for. If your site is not on the first page of Google for your chosen keywords then the chances are your site receives very little traffic. Most surfers never search beyond the 1st page, so it is crucial to get your site there at all costs.

Search engine optimization is the key to getting your site listed on the 1st page of Google. A major part of search engine optimization is link popularity. Building your link popularity will increase your search engine rankings dramatically. Getting quality links to your site from sites that are relevant will see your site move up the rankings quickly.

So how do you get quality back links to your site? You ask for them of course. Most sites have a contact us page. Email the site owner and ask them for a link. Write a nice article and ask them if they will post it on their site. Many site owners are looking for sources of fresh content. Give them some feedback on what you think their site could benefit from. If they have a blog add some comments to the posts, if they have a forum write a few posts and put a link to your site in your signature.

Building a good relationship with other site owners can go a long way to helping you achieve a good Internet presence, which could be the difference between success and failure for your Internet business.

Google And Paid Links

2007-05-20T10:00:00.000Z

Is it really worth buying links? Not according to Matt Cutts of Google.

The crackdown on paid links has started, in a recent post by Matt Cutts he tells you how to report sites that are selling links, and sites that are buying links.

No one likes to think that they are being held back in the search engines by sites that are buying their way to the top. But now you can shop those sites to Google.

The Google algorithm is currently being modified to recognise paid links, and sites that sell them, and mark them down because of it.

Matt also says that it is ok to sell and buy links for traffic. So if you are buying links, you need to find sites with low page rank but high traffic rankings. Which can be difficult as most high traffic sites tend to have high page ranks too.

The best advice I can give you here is dont buy links. Create sites with useful content that people will want to link to. Think about what the web was like 20 years ago. Lots of useful info that people needed and wanted. Going back, is the way forward in my opinion.

SEO - Latest Results

2007-05-06T09:36:00.000Z

Well, Google has finally finished its pagerank update and we have been awarded with a page rank 4. Im quite happy with that, as I was not really targeting high pagerank sites in the link building exercise of late.

I have noticed that Yahoo has been given back its page rank 10, which is very nice of Google. (How the biggest site in the world should ever be ranked a pagerank 9 is beyond me) .

I also see that Statcounter has been dropped to a 9. I think this has something to do with the fact that they are selling links. Google is making a big point about penalizing sites for selling links. According to Google its ok to buy links for traffic but not for pagerank, mmm.

We are continuing our link building campaign, and are currently on around 22549. That does not include MSN, as their tool for calculating backlinks seems to be down.

We are only working part time on this site now, as we have many other clients projects that take priority. But we will continue to update you on the serps as and when.

Good luck to everyone with their efforts, dont work too hard. :-)

Use Social Bookmarking To Generate Traffic To Your Site

2007-04-20T16:12:00.000Z

Social Bookmarking is a great way to drive traffic to your website.

What is Social Bookmarking I hear you cry.

Have you ever heard of sites like Delicious, Furl, Digg, Technorati? Well they are Social Bookmarking sites. If you look at the buttons on the bottom of this post you will see the links to some of the top Social Bookmarking sites on the web.

The way you get the traffic is to write a useful article and submit it to the top Social Bookmarking websites. You only have to submit the title of the article and a couple of lines of text as a little taster. To read the full article people will have to visit your site.

If someone on delicious for example visits your site, reads your article and likes it, they can bookmark it. As more people visit your site and bookmark your article the higher up the list it gets on delicious, generating more visitors and more bookmarks.

One of my articles made it to the popular page on delicious and the traffic went through the roof. If you look at the top of this article you can see the Alexa traffic ranking graph. You can clearly see the traffic spike for the couple of days when the article got onto the popular page.

The other benefit of this, is lots of other sites use data feeds from delicious and the other top Social Bookmarking sites. So not only will your site be popular on delicious, it will also be popular on many others too, generating even more visitors to your site.

If you are unfamiliar with Social Bookmarking, just click on one of the little logos at the bottom of this article, and follow the instructions. You will soon get the hang of it. Its well worth doing and its a great way to get free traffic to your site.

Use CSS For Search Engine Optimization

2007-04-11T08:50:00.000Z

How to use CSS for higher search engine rankings?

Nowadays, when everybody is interested in getting the highest rankings possible for their sites with the search engines, it seems that the era of tables-based web sites is coming to an end. CSS programming appears to give webmasters the upper hand in this race for SEO.

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheet is a web tool that can be utterly necessary if you want to give a professional, quality look to your site. It is recommended by W3C, who manages the standards for the Internet, in order to add style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing, padding, alignment, etc.) to web documents.

The Benefits of Using CSS for SEO

Some of the most common examples of CSS usage, are the modification of the colors of hovered links, text placement, establishing the spacing between words, and the modification of border size and style. The style sheets can be inserted directly into the HTML code of each page, but they can also be written on a different page, in an external file (.css).

This second solution is by far the best one, primarily because it holds undeniable advantages such as:

The HTML code on each page is much cleaner.
The CSS file is cached from the very beginning, and this speeds up the load time for the next pages.
The update process can be performed much faster: You can change the entire site just by modifying one file, no matter how many pages there are.

It is quite easy to see the close connection between search engine optimization and CSS. Style sheets will help you decrease the file size of your web pages, and will give you the opportunity to use more text and links than regular HTML, without being constantly afraid of spamming the search engines.

Here are some of the benefits of using CSS.

Reduced file size.
Faster page loading.
Quicker to make site changes.
Higher rankings with the search engines.

The bottom line would be that CSS is much easier to understand and to optimize than simple HTML. It simplifies both the work of the SEO professional, as well as that of the programmer. CSS programming means providing the site with the ability of faster updates in the future, of faster information transfer, and brings along the advantage of a simple code for search engines.

If we think only about the fact that keywords can be highlighted on a page without negatively affecting its look, the page file-size decreases, the code becomes cleaner and more readable, and the bandwidth costs are diminished by lowering the page load time, then it would be safe to say that there is virtually no limit in the series of advantages of using CSS in SEO campaigns.

How to build backlinks to increase link popularity

2007-03-28T09:32:00.000Z

Building backlinks to increase your link popularity is a major part of Search Engine Optimization. The more backlinks your site has, the higher your site will be listed in the Search Engines.

We launched this site on the 12th of Jan with no incoming links at all.
As of today we have over 20,000 backlinks.

You can check out our backlinks on this link popularity checker

How have we achieved such a large amount of links in such a short time?

We have obviously invested a lot of time and effort to build the link popularity of our site, but basically we have used these methods.

Articles - A well written article is a great way to generate backlinks to your site. Write a good Article, add links to your site in the Article, and submit it to the thousands of free article directories on the web.

Free Directory Submissions - There are thousands of free directories where you can submit your site. We have a list of over 4000 free directories. It is a very time consuming job, but once you are listed, your site stays there for good.

Blog Posts - Blog posts are similar to articles. There are again thousand of blogs online where you can submit your blog posts. You can usually get more links in a blog post than an article. Some blog owners will let you have up to 5 links in one post.

Link Baiting - This is basically where you write some useful content on your site in the hope that people will link to it. In the early days of the internet site owners would link to sites that they found useful, and had information that would benefit their visitors. But with so much information freely available, site owners tend not to do this anymore unless they get a link back to their site. There are still people out there that value good content, and will link back to you. You just have to work harder to get the information that people want.

Building your link popularity is a long hard road. But if you stick at it you will see the results.
You could always take the easy way out of course and pay an SEO like myself to do it for you. :-)

Good luck with your efforts.

Website Marketing Tips To Generate More Traffic

2007-03-16T10:18:00.000Z

Websites are created for one reason, to bring traffic/customers to your products or services. Getting visitors to your web site is an ongoing task, but there are a few things you can do to make your job a little easier.

Here are a few Website Marketing Tips To Generate More Traffic for your site.

To market a web site you need to have good web site design, search engine rankings, opt-in email lists, and link building campaigns.

Website Design - When designing your web site, you must make sure you use your design as a selling tool for your products or service.

If you are creating a corporate web site, you need to make sure that your site looks professional, is easy to read, and easy to navigate.

You will also need to have some good pictures on your homepage, to encourage your visitors to stay, and not just click away.

Search Engine Rankings - Most people use Search Engines to find the information they are looking for, so in my opinion, this is the area that you need to concentrate on most. To achieve good Search Engine Rankings you need good Search Engine Optimization for your site. If your site is listed on the 1st page of Google and other major search engines then you are half way there.

Opt In Email Lists - Opt-in email lists also help bring traffic to your web site. If someone decides to subscribe to your email list, then they are ten times more likely to purchase your product or service.

Also as you make changes to your web site you will be able to let your subscribers know, and try to get them to visit for a second time.

Link Building Campaigns - Link building campaigns are the second most important thing for generating visitors, and go hand in hand with Search Engine Optimization. If you are able to find links from other web sites that are related to yours, then you are more likely to get visitors to your site that will buy your products or services. (This is called targetted traffic).

Links to your web site will build your link popularity and help to improve your search engine rankings, which will again direct targetted traffic to your site.

5 Online Marketing Tips To Drive More Traffic To Your Website

2007-03-02T16:16:00.000Z

One of the most frequently asked questions by online marketers is "how do I drive more traffic to my websites". The answer to this question is easy. Get your websites exposed to as many internet surfers as possible. Once people can find your website, there will be a steady stream of traffic to your website. But to market your website successfully is not an easy task. Efforts, strategies and techniques need to put in place in order to be successful.

Below are 5 common online marketing techniques to drive internet traffic to your websites:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Successful search engine optimization will greatly increase the number of visitors that come to your website, since over 70% of people who are looking for products and services use search engines like Google to locate them. If your website is ranked highly by the search engines, you will get tons of free internet traffic to your website.

One of the best ways to optimize your website to be search engine friendly is by generating back links from other websites to your website. When websites provide a link to your site, the search engines deem your site as a valuable resource and this affects your position in the listings. The more incomming links you have, the higher in the search engines you will be listed.

2. Article Writing & Publishing - Articles are one of the greatest tools for online marketing. They help in SEO by generating back links to your website. By writing short articles on the topic related to your website products or services, you can offer these articles to other website owners or newsletter publishers to use, by submitting them to article directories, forums or blogs. When the publishers use your articles in their ezines or websites, they have to use your author information, which contains links to your website at the bottom of your articles, which means that the publishers will give you a free link from their websites to yours. These back links are counted in SEO. When their visitors read your articles and want to know more about your products or services, they may click the hyperlinks at the bottom of your articles to reach to your website.

3. Pay Per Click Advertising - Pay Per Click is advertising provided by the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo! and others) where you pay for top placement. A good example of Pay Per Click is Google Adwords. It is a quick way to have your ad on the first page of the search engines for popular keywords. There is a catch however, as in the title, you have to pay for every click to your web site. The best way to use Pay Per Click is to set yourself a budget and stick to it, and make sure to monitor your account, those clicks add up fast.

4. Affiliate Marketing - An affiliate program is another way to drive traffic to your web site. Your affiliates are your commissions-based sales people who make money when they sell your products or services. They drive traffic to your web site in exchange for commissions on sales. If you don't want to manage your affiliates yourself, you could subscribe to affiliate network such as ClickBank if your products are digital items. ClickBank marketplace is able to exposure your products to thousands of affiliates who are looking for products to sell online.

5. Posting in Forums - Another great way to generate traffic and links to your site is to post in Forums related to website. If you post interesting and useful information the visitors to the Forums may see you as an authority figure on your subject and visit your site to find out more. You can add signature links to your posts, to give the Forum visitors easy access to your site.

Any internet business will die without a good traffic stream. The above 5 online marketing tips are time tested & proven methods to drive more traffic to your website.

If you would like more information about our SEO Services, or would like to find out how we can help you get listed higher in the major search engines, please email us at webordead@yahoo.com

How to choose an SEO Consultant

2007-02-23T19:10:00.000Z

As a business owner, it is impossible to ignore the power of the Internet. With a worldwide audience only a mouse click away, most business owners can see the huge benefits in creating a website for their business. But, it doesn’t matter how great a website looks if its not optimized correctly no one will ever find it.

When it comes to optimizing your website, there are various steps you can take. Some business owners attempt to optimize their websites themselves, but this can be a bad idea. It takes a high level of specialized knowledge in order to optimize a site correctly. In addition, search engine optimization takes time. Most business owners rarely have the time necessary to correctly implement search engine optimization. Therefore, it is usually best to hire a professional SEO that can optimize the site to its fullest potential, or that can provide you with the proper SEO training to guarantee you get the job done right.

Since Search Engine Optimization is becoming an ever-increasingly popular form of internet marketing, more and more “SEO experts” are appearing online every day. So, how do you separate the quality consultants, from those that are merely out to take your money? When searching for an SEO expert, there are a number of things to watch out for.

- The SEO expert should offer link building campaigns as one of the services they provide. Link building campaigns are highly effective when it comes to getting high listings in search engines because the more incoming links your site has, the more credibility your site will have with the search engines, thus resulting in higher placement.

- The SEO consultant you choose should also provide a service for submitting your website to directories. This will ensure your website is frequently crawled by search engine spiders.

- You should be offered variety of different SEO packages, making it possible for you to find the one that is best for your business needs.

- The SEO Consultant should also be willing to train you in search engine optimization if you wish to do the work yourself.

- And most importantly the SEO Consultant should have a proven track record. In other words, he or she should be able to give you examples of jobs they have done for previous clients, and the search engine rankings that they achieved for those clients.

If you follow these simple rules, then choosing and SEO Consultant to optimize your website should be a relatively painless experience.

If you would like more information on our Search Engine Optimization services, please email us at webordead@yahoo.com

8 Tips To Web Site Optimization

2007-02-14T21:24:00.000Z

Web site optimization should be one of your main priorities and you should make sure to take this serious. If you are on a limited budget focus on optimization rather than advertising. For instance will a web site which takes ages to load may make your visitors go away even before they had the chance to see what you have got to offer them. So please take some of your valuable time and check out the 8 great rules of website optimization which are listed below. Follow these simple guidelines and your visitors will be much happier – and so will you when you see both increases in page rank and sales.

1. Content is King – As usual! This is maybe the most important aspect of a website. Search Engines love regularly updated content and people who are searching the internet are almost always looking for information. Regularly updated content will keep your visitors coming back. It can be time consuming to create new content all the time, so you might want to include automatically refreshed content like guest books, forums, or a RSS feed with articles.

2. Website Load Time - Still not all surfers have access to high speed internet connections and many still use a phone connection and modem to do their online tasks. For these people a slow loading website will be the same as money thrown out the window, so at least make sure your web pages load within 30 seconds using a 56k modem. People are impatient and won’t wait more than 30 sec for your web pages to load, it’s that simple.

3. Describing Page Titles - Your main web page might be the most visited page of your website but don’t forget your other pages. Good describing of internal links like /mercedes-benz-review.html for instance is much better for both the reader and the search engines than a link looking like this: /fad1258/links=?cars.mercedes.php or anything like that. With good describing of internal links and link placement your other web pages should also show up in the search results. Make sure to include your main keyword of that particular web page into your title.

4. Internal Pages & Optimization - You should optimize each page on your website for individual keywords, with individual headings and individual Meta Tags so the search engines can crawl and index not only your main page but also each of your sub pages.

5. Make Sure Your Internal Links Are Working - Few things are more annoying when visiting a web site than internal links which are not working as they should. Download links that are not working any more, links to internal pages where you get a 404 error message etc can be quite annoying! You want to prevent this at all costs.

6. Go For Two or Three Main Keywords Per Page Only - A perfectly optimized web site will have every single page optimized for only two or three main keywords. Use these keywords between tags and make sure that the keywords used, and variations of them, appear on every two paragraphs of your web page. Also make sure your last line of the body text will have at least one of the two keywords embedded. If your web page has been optimized for the term “Best UK Pubs” your end of the body text could be something like CopyRight 2006 Jim Smith – Your Guide To the Best UK Pubs

7. Increase The Number Of One Way Inbound Links - As the power of reciprocal linking is fading you need to take your web site optimization to the next level. You absolutely need to have as many inbound one way links as possible to get a satisfying search engine ranking. One way you can achieve this is by writing articles and submitting them to article directories leaving your signature and link at the end of the article. Submit your website to every online directory you can find. This is an ongoing job that might take time to finish and it can also take several weeks before your site get indexed. But it is worth the wait! Use every ethical chance you get to point links to your website because it is incredibly important for your rankings.

8. Do not Spam - It is very frustrating when you have submitted your site to the search engines and to directories only to find that you are not listed. Its very tempting to keep submitting your site, but that is a no no. Search engines and directories in particular, can take weeks to list your site, sometimes months. If you are continually submitting your site to search engines and directories the likelyhood is you not get listed, but will get banned.

Website optimization is an art you can learn to master by learning and taking action on small parts at a time. It is an ongoing job and should be taken extremely serious if you want to get listed on the first pages in the search engines and receive that boatload of free traffic you have been dreaming about.

SEO Update

2007-02-09T12:55:00.000Z

Well its now Feb 9th, and I would like to update you on our progress.

Backlinks are as follows.

Google 13
Altavista 2,290
MSN 1,316
All the Web 2,270
Yahoo 2,541

Making a total of 8430

Search engine rankings as follows.

Free SEO Advice... Number 4 on Yahoo
Free SEO Consultation... Number 1 on Google
Free Optimization Consultation... Number 1 on Google
Optimizing Services... Number 2 on Google
Search Engine Rash... Number 1 on Google and Number 2 on Yahoo

Screenshots of all of these rankings can be provided on request.

If you wish to get your site listed higher in the major search engines please drop us an email.

Search Engine Rash

2007-01-29T13:19:00.000Z

Search Engine Rash, (abbr: SER). def: 1. to have multiple first page listings in the search engines, 2. to appear all over the Search Engines like a rash (note: although the term rash is generally deemed a negative word, in this case, the meaning can only be referred to negatively by your competitors)

SER is a concept to describle a situation where your company's website has multiple 1st page listings for the same search term in Google, Yahoo or MSN. This can be accomplished by the implementation of a number of techniques, which include but are not limited to; press releases article submissions, blog posts, and other text keyword related promotions. These processes are the culmination of years of experiments with SEO, and entail a combination of on site and off site promotional endevours which ultimately put links back to your company. This may include links from your own website, and via other websites.

Picking the right 3rd party websites is the key, as duplicate content penalties can be given, if you do not manage the strategy correctly.

Its a great feeling when you see your website getting on the 1st page of Google, but what about if you could get 3 out of the top 10 listings on any of the major search engines for your chosen keywords. In fact, we have known one of our customers grab 9 out of the top 10 placements. Obviously, the extent to which we can Rash a particular search term does depend on how competetive the sector is that you operate. This is not just speculation though, and the results speak for themselves.

In our opinion, SEO is not just about getting on the 1st page of Google anymore - its about getting as many first page listings as possible in order to put you in a prominent position. Your customers will get the impression that you are the expert in your field. SEO is no longer good enough to put you ahead of your competition, you need SER to fully exploit the web.

We do not profess to be able to do this for any site, but our optimizing skills are such that the chances of it happening to your site is a very real possibility.
If you need more information about how our services can help you achieve SER status, please email us at webordead@yahoo.com

SEO Progress Report

2007-01-24T18:08:00.000Z

The site was launched on the 12th Jan, as you all know. It is now the 24th of Jan, and we are starting to see some results of our work.

We currently have 804 backlinks as follows:

301 on Altavista
13 on MSN
297 on All The Web
193 on Yahoo

We do not have any back links showing on Google yet, as they do not update as often as the other search engines.

We do however have a 1st page ranking on Google for the Search Term "Free SEO Consultation"

Not bad results for 12 days work.

Check back soon for more progress reports.

About Us

2007-01-12T12:50:00.000Z

We have been building and optimizing websites for ourselves, and our clients for many years. Thus culminating in a wealth of experience with website creation and promotion. This website WeborDead, has been launched as a shop window for our optimizing services. The site has been set live today, Friday 12th Jan 2007, and we will be using our own SEO services on this site to see how long it takes to get the site into a prominent position within the major search engines.

This is an experiment and a test to show off our expertise, watch as we put our reputations on the line. The posts over the coming weeks and months will show our performence, as we try and hopefully succeed in launching this website into the SEO world, with outstanding search engine positioning.

If you would like more information about our SEO Services, or would like to find out how we can help you get listed higher in the major search engines, please email us at webordead@yahoo.com

Technorati

2007-01-12T12:37:00.000Z

Technorati Profile

Our Latest Site

2007-01-12T12:34:00.000Z

We have just finished our latest work, a property portal called World Property Links UK This new website encompasses a lot of php functionality, some that we have made, and some that is freely available. PHP is certainly a very powerfull and at times surprisingly easy to use scripting language. I say this very much with tongue in cheek as there has been a large learning curve.

Formatting the pages with css is another learning experience, and integration for the different browsers is a very interesting experience ;)

Search Engine Optimization or SEO

2007-01-12T12:23:00.000Z

What does your site need in order to rank higher in the search engines?
Its quite simple really, your site needs SEO.

SEO is basically the ongoing process of making your site friendly to the search engines by optimizing your sites' pages and its content.

If your site is not optimized correctly, and it is not search engine friendly, then the search engines will not rank it highly, or may not rank it at all - in some cases.

If your competitors are using SEO, which they probably are, then you need to use it too.

Search Engine Marketing if used correctly can earn you a substantial increase in extra income. There could be thousands of people crying out for your products or services, but if they cannot find you in the search engines, or you are not listed high enough, they will either not find you, or they will go to the websites that are listed higher than you, namely your competitors.

Your website should not be just a place where your customers can go to find out about your products or services. Your website should be a powerful marketing tool to attract new customers from the millions of internet users, that need your products or services.

If you would like more information on our Search Engine Optimization, and Marketing services, or to find out how our SEO Marketing can help your website rank higher in the major search engines, please email us at webordead@yahoo.com
We offer a free SEO consultation.